Works of Alexander Pushkin (112 page)

Two poems published in August, 1831, show this inclination to pose as the champion of the social
status quo.
Had there been a laureate- ship in Russia, Poushkin might have been suspected of coveting the office. The Government did not fail to acknowledge his change of attitude.

In November he received a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs worth five thousand roubles a year. At the same time permission — amounting almost to a command — was given to him to search the Imperial Archives for material for a history of Peter the Great. A safe occupation for a poet of fiery temperament and liberal tendencies! The following years saw the completion of his
History of Pougachev’s Rebellion —
a work which brought him in a considerable sum — of
The Captains Daughter
, one of his best prose tales, and of several poems, including “The Roussalka” and “Doubrovsky.”

Poushkin threw himself into his historical studies with a fever born of discontent. His wife’s style of living surpassed even his own in luxury and extravagance, and in spite of his official salary the pressure of debt was now added to his many troubles. A literary speculation,
The Contemporary
, started by him in all good faith as an organ which should aid the cause of progress and enlightenment while remaining loyal to the Government, did not prove the success he had hoped for. His position was indeed melancholy. His submission to authority had not won him the confidence of the Government, while it had undoubtedly estranged many of his most fervent admirers. He was keenly mortified by his failure to count as a great influence on either side; nor could he foresee a future in which — as has actually happened — his duality should cause him to be regarded as the representative of both phases of national sentiment.

Conscious that the great public was falling away from him, Poushkin addressed it directly in his poem “The People” with a bitterness and invective that recall, as Spassovich says, “the dispossessed Lear fleeing before the tempest.” Yet the poet was at the climax of his intellectual development, and seems to have been on the eve of acquiring the self-mastery and inward spiritual liberty of which no external circumstances could have had power to deprive him. A few years’ grace, even if they had not brought him “the poet’s rapt security,” the clear vision and self- dependence of a Goethe, would at least have left him stronger, more finely disciplined and composed. He had begun to find out for himself that “though there is no happiness on earth, there may be peace and freedom.”

A short time before his death a wave of depression seemed to sweep over his mind once more. In a letter to Madame Ossipov, his friend of years, he gives vent to a cry of despair: “I am bewildered and exasperated to the last degree. Believe me, life may have its pleasures, but every man bears some bitterness within which becomes intolerable in the end. The world is a disgusting and dirty swamp.” There was much excuse for this pessimistic outbreak. The clouds appeared to be gathering over Poushkin’s life for some inevitable catastrophe. Skabichevsky shows how a coalition had been formed against the poet in the fashionable world, instigated by Ouvarov and Benkendorf. His enemies were only awaiting some chance of effecting his ruin, and the opportunity was not long in presenting itself. A flirtation — indiscreet, but not culpable — between Poushkin’s young wife, then much fêted in society, and a youthful guardsman, Baron de Heckeren-Dantès, proved all-sufficient for their purpose. A scandal, reflecting unpleasantly on Poushkin’s honour, was set afloat, while at the same time the poet was pestered with hateful anonymous letters. The effect of this cunningly directed friction upon Poushkin’s hasty and undisciplined temper may be easily foreseen. It was essential that he should not lose his head and calmer judgment, for Dantès was under the special protection of the Emperor, and any rupture would be sure to give displeasure at Court. But Poushkin being hyper-sensitive and, moreover, the child of an age that recognised but one remedy for outraged honour, fell an easy victim into the trap prepared for him. He believed himself bound to challenge Dantès, and on January 27th, 1837, a duel with pistols was fought in which the poet was mortally wounded. Danzas, Poushkin’s second, maintained that even at the last moment the meeting might have been prevented, since Benkendorf had been informed of its time and place, but sent the police — whether by accident or design none could ever prove — in a totally different direction.

Poushkin was carried back to his house in Saint Petersburg, where he died after two days of intense suffering. With the news of his death all Russian society awoke to the consciousness of its loss. The poet’s weaknesses, his opportunism, his dalliance with both parties, were forgotten in a genuine outburst of sorrow and gratitude. Russia remembered only that Poushkin was the first and greatest of her national poets.

Of all the tributes to the memory of Poushkin, none awoke such enthusiasm as the impassioned verses which Lermontov — then scarcely known to fame — wrote in praise of “The Master.” These were passed from hand to hand, and afterwards, when the ten thousand printed copies were exhausted, from mouth to mouth.

Every class desired to honour the dead poet, but official suspicion dogged Poushkin, even to the grave. Fearing a demonstration, orders were given to remove his coffin to the church on the evening of February 1st. Admission to the requiem service was by ticket only, and thus the public was excluded from paying respect to his memory. Two days later, escorted by the police, Poushkin’s remains were removed during the night and interred near those of his mother in the Sviatogorsky Ouspensky Monastery.

POUSHKIN: HIS WORKS by Rosa Newmarch

Bielinsky’s weighty articles, written between 1843 and 1846, remain to this day the sole exhaustive review of Poushkin’s poems, and continue to form the basis of all close analysis of his work. But even these criticisms are lacking in the complete insight which comes of biographical research.

For many years after Poushkin’s death the suspicion which still attached to his name, and the close censorship exercised over the publication of his literary remains, proved hindrances to the preparation of a complete biography of the poet. His life had to be largely compiled from hearsay, and when the first instalment of it appeared — which was not until twenty years after his death — it did not do much to elucidate certain matters which could not be safely handled even at that distance of time. To analyse his poetry in the light of biographical facts remained for years an impossibility, therefore Bielinsky’s review of Poushkin’s life-work is complete only from the purely aesthetic side. When at last the inner life of the man was revealed to the world, his moods, theories, and social views, public opinion was sharply divided, and every section of a disunited society strove to claim Poushkin as its own. He was hailed in turn as the defender of tradition, as the champion of social liberty, as the high-priest of pure art, as the founder of modern realism. And owing to the complexity of Poushkin’s nature, these apparently irreconcilable claims have all some foundation of reason. Poushkin was essentially the child of his country and of his age, in whom were reflected all the varying shades of thought and emotion with which he was surrounded. Spassovich compares Poushkin’s genius to a placid sheet of water, the surface of which is broken into circles that touch and interlink, each of these rings representing some sphere of external influence which widens and vanishes as it grows more remote from its centre. But Spassovich does not sufficiently realise that these reticulations were mainly superficial and scarcely disturbed the actual depths of Poushkin’s individuality.

The poems dating from his schooldays, and the early satirical or “pamphlet” verses, are chiefly interesting as showing the extraordinary rapidity of his intellectual growth, and the care which, from the first, he bestowed upon the technical side of his art. We discern the influence of Joukovsky in the romantic colouring of some of these juvenile poems, and that of Batioushkov in the chiselled excellence of their workmanship. “Though they have not the quality of Byron’s ‘Hours of Idleness,”‘says Bielinsky, “they astonish us by their elegance and felicity.” In the verses entitled “To my comrades on leaving school,” we find this lad of sixteen striving already after novelty of rhyme and rhythm, and venturing to use the simplest words, when they served his purpose, in preference to the insipid euphemisms of the pseudo-classical school. The popularity of his witty and epigrammatic verses was extraordinary, even at a period when that kind of anonymous literature was a feature of social life. “At that time,” says a contemporary, “there was not a single ensign in the army, however illiterate, who did not know these verses by heart. Poushkin was the echo of his generation with all its faults and virtues.”

The political extravagances of Poushkin’s youth have been severely censured by some of his critics. Pypin, whose opinions are almost invariably just, because based upon a wide historical outlook, reminds us that his instability and lack of definite social convictions were the natural outcome of that period of unrest, when even Alexander I himself was carried away, first by Western liberalism and afterwards by the general reaction. One thing may be said in favour of Poushkin’s satire: it was nearly always directed against what was actually injurious to society, and never used as the weapon of mere personal spite.

Upon the political verses followed a group of transitional poems, in which the influence of his Russian precursors is perceptibly on the wane, and that of Byron claims the ascendancy. One of the first indications of this phase is shown in a short poem, “The Black Shawl,” a Moldavian song which the poet overheard in a tavern at Kishiniev, and afterwards adapted to his own fancy, infusing into it a drop of the true Byronic essence. Since this poem marks the starting- point of a new departure in Poushkin’s career, I avail myself of Professor Morfill’s kind permission to reprint his translation of it among the examples at the close of this chapter.

In
The Prisoner in the Caucasus
Spassovich sees “The Corsair” in another dress. But even this early poem, written at a time when Poushkin’s admiration for Byron was in its most ardent and uncritical stage, marks the essential difference between the temperaments of the two poets. Poushkin’s hero has far less of the self-centred, savage misanthropy of the Corsair; his dissatisfaction with society turns to brooding melancholy rather than to fierce protest. Speaking of this work in later life, Poushkin said, “It contains the verses of my heart,” but his artistic judgment condemned it in his maturity.

The Fountain of Bakchisarai
(1822) shows a steady advance in individuality, and when we come to
The Gipsies
(1824) and
Poltava
(1828), the difference in method and sentiment between master and disciple is distinctly noticeable. Aleko, the hero of
The Gipsies
, belongs to the picturesque type of social outcast who figures again and again in the works of both Byron and Poushkin. But Poushkin was already outgrowing the sombre self-sufficiency which made Byron pose as the leading character in most of his romantic poems. The Russian poet now began to regard his creation from an objective standpoint, sometimes even from a critical one. Byron, we feel sure, was in fullest sympathy with Conrad, Lara, and the Giaour; but when Poushkin puts into the mouth of the old gipsy leader his dignified reproof to the guest who has brought discord and bloodshed into the free and simple life of the caravan, we suspect that it is the poet himself who is criticising Aleko’s unprofitable egoism.
The Gipsies
marks the second phase of Poushkin’s worship of Byron.

A further stage of independent development is reached in
Poltava
which some critics rank as Poushkin’s finest achievement. The poem shares the same subject as Byron’s “Mazeppa,” but here the difference of treatment is not only due to temperamental causes, but also to a widely different historical point of view. While Byron founded his poem on a passage from Voltaire’s
History of Charles XII
, Poushkin had recourse to national tradition; consequently his poem gains in convincing realism, although losing something in romantic glamour. Poushkin’s Hetman of Cossacks is a rapacious, cunning, brutal soldier of fortune, scarcely a hero in any sense of the word. But the true hero of
Poltava
is not Mazeppa, but Peter the Great, whose character had an intense fascination for Poushkin, and to whose memory he dedicated one of the most powerful and polished of his poems, “The Bronze Horseman.”

In none of Poushkin’s works, however, can we trace his gradual emancipation from Byron’s influence, and his steady progress towards independence and nationality, so clearly as in
Eugene Oniegin.
This, the most popular of his poems, also engaged his thoughts for the longest period; being, in fact, a kind of confession, or autobiographical record, extending over seven years of his life. In 1823 Poushkin wrote to Prince Viazemsky, that he had begun a novel in verse in the style of “Don Juan,” and in his preface to the first chapter, published in 1825, he says that the opening of his work will recall “‘Beppo,’ the facetious work of the gloomy Byron.” But a year later he had left all thought of imitation so far behind that he indignantly denied any connection between
Oniegin
and “Beppo” or “Don Juan.” The subject of the poem is drawn from contemporary life, and the design is simple to the verge of naïveté. The scene is laid in the heart of rural Russia. The first chapter introduces Madame Lerin and her daughters, Tatiana and Olga, who, as I have already related, were undoubtedly sketched from the sisters Wulf, and the old servant, Nurse Philipievna, the original of whom may have been Arina Rodionova.